Pyroscope and Grafana Phlare join together to accelerate adoption of continuous profiling, the next pillar of observability

We are happy to announce that Pyroscope, the company behind the eponymous open source continuous profiling project, is now part of Grafana Labs. With this acquisition, we will be merging the Pyroscope project and Grafana Phlare, the project we launched last year, under the new name Grafana Pyroscope.

We first met the Pyroscope team, led by co-founders Ryan Perry and Dmitry Filimonov, as they were graduating from Y Combinator. Like Grafana Labs, they have open source in their DNA. Ryan was first introduced to Grafana dashboards as a software engineer at a mobile app analytics company, and Dmitry has been using Grafana since 2014, the early days of the OSS project.

Since then, we’ve admired the work that the Pyroscope team has done with the open source project as well as the Pyroscope Cloud product. They’ve built a highly available and scalable solution to support their various product lines: continuous profiling, ad hoc profiling, profiling exemplars (linking trace spans with profiles), and CI/CD profiling. 

This investment reflects our belief in continuous profiling as the fourth pillar of observability (after metrics, logs, and traces). Continuous profiling offers developers a deeper view of resource usage of their code, helping them to understand their application performance and optimize their infrastructure spend. At Grafana Labs, we believe that the developer experience is essential for helping engineering teams build, maintain, and operate great software. The Pyroscope team shares these beliefs. By focusing on the developer experience, they’ve built a great community of profiling enthusiasts, and we’re looking forward to working with the team and the community to advance the state of the art in profiling technology. 

“As we built Pyroscope, we always knew our Grafana plugin and integration within the Grafana ecosystem would play a crucial role in accelerating open source adoption and supporting Pyroscope Cloud users," says Ryan, Pyroscope’s CEO. “As we collaborated more closely with the Grafana and Phlare teams, we began to see that our two projects were becoming increasingly aligned and that merging them would be the best way to serve our users.”

We’re excited to unite the Pyroscope and Phlare teams and accelerate our plan to launch profiling in Grafana Cloud, which will make it easy to correlate profiles with metrics, logs, and traces. By doing so, we can help engineering teams gain a deeper understanding of their systems, quickly identify and resolve issues, and ultimately, deliver better software faster.